Card Party and Tabletop Village present... the RS-PK Emerald City Showdown!

Card Party West 2025 is an exciting multi-day Pokémon card convention happening October 3-5, 2025, at the Seattle Convention Center. We know many retro gaming enthusiasts will be there (or are thinking of going!), and we'd like to host a special TCG tournament, using one of the most popular retro formats, to get everyone together for a bit of old-school fun!

Where will the tournament be played?

The tournament will played in-person at Seattle Card Party on Saturday, October 4 at the Seattle Convention Center.

Entry costs

Anyone who has a Card Party ticket for Saturday, October 4 may play in the tournament. There are no additional fees for tournament entry on top of the cost of a ticket. You may purchase a 3-day ticket or a Saturday-only ticket here.

It isn't possible to play in the tournament without having a Saturday ticket, since this tournament is taking place as one of the scheduled convention events.

Legal Sets

The tournament will be played in the RS-PK (EX Block) format. The legal sets are:

• Ruby & Sapphire

• Sandstorm

• Dragon

• Team Magma vs Team Aqua

• Hidden Legends

• FireRed LeafGreen

• Team Rocket Returns

• Deoxys

• Emerald

• Unseen Forces

• Delta Species

• Legend Maker

• Holon Phantoms

• Crystal Guardians

• Dragon Frontiers

• Power Keepers

• POP Series 1

• POP Series 2

• POP Series 3

• POP Series 4

• POP Series 5

• Nintendo Black Star Promos 001–040

• All Japanese-exclusive cards of this era, e.g. PokéPark, movie promos, Victory Ring, etc. Because these cards don't exist in the Limitless API, you'll have to DM @champion.of.fun on Discord or @jparanada on Twitter if you're planning on using them so that we can arrange a proxy for you to use in the deckbuilder. Here is a list of the most competitive Japanese exclusives.

What will prizing be???

Cash prizing is planned; exact payouts are TBD. We are also planning on having top 8 playmats, but this hasn't been finalized.

Tournament goodies

We will run giveaways—some of which will be era-appropriate!—between rounds of the tournament. We're also planning on having tournament-exclusive playmats available for purchase, but these haven't been finalized yet (small chance this falls through).

Deckbuilding rules

The EX era is the most difficult to build retro decks for since many tournament-viable cards are expensive. At this tournament we'd like to focus on gameplay and bringing retro enthusiasts together, and so we've made our card legality rules lenient to allow as many people to play as possible.

• Trainer cards that have the same name as a legal card but have effect text that's not era-accurate are legal and will be played as they were worded during this era, e.g. Scarlet & Violet Rare Candy would be allowed, and would be played as the Holon Phantoms Rare Candy.
• Non-English cards are legal.
• Cards from the World Championship decks are legal.
• Cards from the TCG Classic Collection box are legal and will be played as they were worded during this era, e.g. TCG Classic Rocket's Admin. should be played as the TRR printing.
• Color proxies are legal; you may use a print-to-order service to make proxies directly printed on cardstock, or print proxies using a color printer + copy paper and then put those printed slips in front of other cards in sleeves. (Although this in theory results in cards of different thickness if mixing proxies and real cards, in our experience this does not impact gameplay in practice.) When printing proxies, use English era-correct images. The exception would be for Japanese exclusives; in this case you can either use an image of the Japanese card and provide an English translation as requested, or you may use a card image where the English translation has been edited in.
• Cards that have similar/exact effects to in-format cards but that have different names are not legal, e.g. do not use the card N to proxy Rocket's Admin. Just use a printed proxy instead :)
• When using Japanese/WC cards, ensure that your card sleeves are completely opaque (since these card backs are different from the standard ones).
• In cases where the era-correct English card text isn't on the card, we strongly encourage bringing an era-correct reference image/card.

Game rulings

We'll be using era-accurate rules and rulings for this tournament.

Pokémon Organized Play rulings often did not reflect the designers' intent during this era, and thus we will not be relying on the Compendium EX for rulings. We will use the Double Rainbow Cup FAQ for rulings; this is written in Japanese (Google Translate does a decent job of translating it). In cases where the DRC FAQ doesn't provide a ruling, we will fall back to using Compendium EX.

A (non-exhaustive) list of mistranslated cards that never received errata is here.

This rules FAQ will be provided as a printout during the tournament; you may want to review it ahead of time.

New to RS-PK??

Check out these links below for good references!

• Holon Research Tower compiles RS-PK tournament results and archetype data
• erik's latest tier list video
• Kanten's note
• JKlacz's blog
• PTCG Archive

Tournament Structure

Prior to the tournament, please make sure you are registered for it on Limitless (create an account if you haven't done so already). You will have to submit a decklist as part of registration. We also request that you join our Discord server as we will use the card-party-3-rs-pk-tournament-oct-4 channel to send out updates, and we may reach out to participants directly on Discord as needed.

Check-in: Saturday, October 4 at 11:00 am PT-12:00 pm PT (use Limitless to check in)

Start time: Saturday, October 4 at 12:00 pm PT

Swiss will be BO1, 35-minute rounds. The procedures for handling penalties and incomplete games currently used in sanctioned play will also be used in this tournament.

Top cut will begin after a short break following the end of Swiss. The top 8 players will play Single Elimination BO1.

Are there any restrictions to decklists?

Decklists will be closed for the duration of the tournament, but will be made public after the event ends. Any foul play detected or reported by a player and proven will result in forfeiting all prizing along with a permanent ban from any future tournaments. Your list must be legal to participate; contact @champion.of.fun on Discord or @jparanada on Twitter if you have any questions or trouble submitting your list. If you import a list into Limitless and find that it has fewer than 60 cards, the culprits are usually POP series cards or the Unown forms from Unseen Forces. You will have to add these cards back into your deck manually.

Having trouble with anything or have any questions? Feel free to contact us in the Tabletop Village discord server; there's a dedicated channel there for this event.